We should provide some sort of incentive for BRINGING people into the forums. For people who are forum users already, if you refer someone to the site and they sign up, perhaps you should recieve an award. (points or something of that nature.) I dont know if it is possible, but perhaps we could include in the signup for the forum some sort of box that asks (Who referred you) if the player was referred by an existing forum member, maybe they could both receive a point award.

Not sure how feasible that is.

Second one;

I thought of this the other day, and I think it would bring A LOT of attention to galactic magnate. And I think that players that began playing will end up staying longer, and will be more apt to stay in the forums. What we should do is have some sort of "achievement" system on the forums. I have seen a lot of forums that are powered by the same type of website we use, I believe it is phpBB group who powers us. On some forums I have seen where they have miniature games of some sort of nature. You can unlock certain games (or non-real items) by achieving points. How you achieved points on the forum was by posting. BUT what if, we achieved points on the forum by instilling an achievement system. Look at it like its Call of Duty 4. If you have ever played it, when you kill 10 people with a knife you get an achievement for it, and you get points. How we can apply this to GM is by things like, every so many wins, or every consecutive win, or winning with in a time limit, or winning with so much cash, ETC. we can include over a hundred of specific little achievements in which GM players can try for. I think that would be interesting if there is anyway of doing it. I know it is almost fantasy to think about it, because it seems so far out there... But try to bring it to reality. The CATCH would be of course that to earn achievement points that you could use in the forum or VIEW in the forum you would actually have to have a forum account. This would be hard to do, but if there is any way to do it, we should look into it._________________If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.

It wouldn't be entirely known... But I think it would be simple to determine if someone was abusing it. I mean if they are that low to do it in the first place... it would be safe to say that this community has rejected them at one time or another in the past.

The way it would be easy to tell if they are abusing this is by simply observing the amount of people being referred to this site by one person. I mean if someone refers 10 people in one week, its time to take a look and determine what is going on. There aren't a lot of people I know that have access to different computers with a different IP address or a dynamic one for that matter. So, I don't see it being near as harmful as it is beneficial._________________If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.

Good point, im sure someone would try to get away with it it if they had the chance. Could somone simply go from one internet cafe to another then register w/different new accounts and collect the bonus referral points until they got caught?

Yes they could... But whenever you determine if something is beneficial or not beneficial the one thing that must be evaluated is the condition: The positives must outway the costs.

Sure, some low life, or maybe even a couple, might spoil the system a little bit, but eventually they will be caught and banned. But, in all reality if we choose not to do this idea because we feel a few might take advantage of it, then we are ignoring the people who would have legitimately been introduced to this forum and would have grown to like it as a result of this action.

Thank you for pointing out one of the flaws, because it IS essential to see the negatives of everything so that we can look to the future in how to avoid any unneccasary and overwhelming problems._________________If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.

I've been thinking about your 2 suggestions magflag. Although both good ideas I'm not sure how workable they would be as currently points alterations are done manually by moderators. Even down to the getting the calculator out.

Now I think your ideas are good but maybe not at the current time possible. But off your idea I did wonder about perhaps a post of the month. So people voted for their favourite post of the month, and perhaps the winner or top 3 could get a point prize...perhaps.

This in terms of the system of points alterations might be more practical.

I am 100% for getting as many players involved in the forum as possible. I know when I joined GM I didn't join or post on the forum for a long time. Partly as I didn't know what to say, and also as a new person it feels like everyone else knows each other so its hard.
I think we need threads for new players who may not as yet want to comment on the game as such, because they are new to it.

Thanks for your input Trace. I was not really aware of how moderators dealt with points... I am not sure how complicated it is, I mean I kind of had a vision in mind where the moderator just look at maybe some coding or a namelist or something and just changed their points. If that were the case I would have no problem with myself keeping track of points for references and such... But being as it is harder than I thought I guess my thoughts about that are not as feasible.

As for the second idea... It is not actually a system in which awards points to ingame players... Instead, it is like XBOX 360 Points. They have no value other than the pride of having so many said points. What I was visioning was a system where perhaps (for example), you could go to a page on the forum or in the site or something where it showed player stats and achievements they earned. LIke say for example we had a random achievenment for go to jail 15 times in a 2p or something... That achievement would not increase their score IN GAME, but will be made public to the forum users and such. It is more an ego thing than anything else. I mean we can allow prizes to be made for the first person to achieve so many achievements if we wanted to but I think that this element mainly just serves as another reason for being part of the community. If anyone has played XBOX you will know what I am talking about when you look at other people's achievements and see what they have achieved on particular video games..

Problem is, I think implementing the second one would be hard as crap, and is hence probably just a waste of words... I mean kreso would be the only one who could take on such a thing, but he seems dormant._________________If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.